Supernova

Light from the supernova 2013df has traveled more than 60 million light-years to finally be detectable from Earth, and today you have a chance to see it for yourself. At 4 p.m. PDT, sky watchers around the world can watch a live video feed of the supernova broadcast from a telescope in the Cayman Islands. The video comes courtesy of the online sky-watching site Slooh.com. A type II supernova occurs when a star more than 10 times more massive than our sun runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses in on itself.

Staring into the dramatic corpse of a dead star known as Cassiopeia A, astronomers using NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope have for the first time mapped out radioactive titanium in a supernova. Charting this astrophysical frontier, as described in the journal Nature, will help scientists understand what happens when a massive star explodes. Supernova remnants are the leftover shells of gas and dust forged from within the exploding star. The beautiful video above shows how that explosion develops over roughly 150 milliseconds -- less than two blinks of an eye -- and took millions of computer hours to simulate, scientists said.

Astronomers have for the first time observed a nova-producing system turn into a supernova, a finding that indicates the universe has more than one way to create a nova. A normal Type Ia supernova is a rare event, occurring perhaps once or twice every century. The type of supernova observed by a team of astronomers led by astronomer Ben Dilday of UC Santa Barbara is estimated to occur about one time in every 1,000 supernovae. The findings are important because supernovae are generally all considered to have the same intrinsic brightness, making them what astronomers call "standard candles" used for estimating distances across the cosmos.

Twelve million years ago, a star exploded. Today, you can see it online. At 1 p.m. PST Thursday, the website Slooh.com will livestream a view of the newly discovered supernova 2014J from its telescope in the Canary Islands. Supernovas are extremely bright stellar explosions that can briefly glow brighter than an entire galaxy. This one is a Type Ia supernova, which means it used to be a white dwarf star. Although this supernova was recently discovered, the white dwarf exploded 12 million years ago. It took that long for the light from this dramatic event to reach us on Earth.

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope is providing fresh views of oddly bright black holes and breathtaking supernovae, scientists said Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach. NuSTAR mission scientists released high-energy X-ray images of two strangely bright black holes in the arms of spiral galaxy IC 342 about 7 million light years away and of Cassiopeia A, the shell of an exploded star, known as a supernova, just 11,000 light years away. Since its launch last summer , the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has been snapping shots at energies up to 79 kiloelectron volts - far beyond the roughly 10 KeV limit of other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Scientists have identified a type of supernova, or exploding star, that produces unusually large amounts of calcium — enough perhaps to explain the abundance of that element in the universe and in our bones. Perhaps more significant for astronomers, these calcium-rich exploding stars — eight have been identified so far — may also represent a new class of supernova, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. "If it's not a new genus, it's at least a new species of supernova," said Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and one of the study's 28 coauthors.

Twelve million years ago, a star exploded. Today, you can see it online. At 1 p.m. PST Thursday, the website Slooh.com will livestream a view of the newly discovered supernova 2014J from its telescope in the Canary Islands. Supernovas are extremely bright stellar explosions that can briefly glow brighter than an entire galaxy. This one is a Type Ia supernova, which means it used to be a white dwarf star. Although this supernova was recently discovered, the white dwarf exploded 12 million years ago. It took that long for the light from this dramatic event to reach us on Earth.

Staring into the dramatic corpse of a dead star known as Cassiopeia A, astronomers using NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope have for the first time mapped out radioactive titanium in a supernova. Charting this astrophysical frontier, as described in the journal Nature, will help scientists understand what happens when a massive star explodes. Supernova remnants are the leftover shells of gas and dust forged from within the exploding star. The beautiful video above shows how that explosion develops over roughly 150 milliseconds -- less than two blinks of an eye -- and took millions of computer hours to simulate, scientists said.

Type 1a supernovae, exploding stars that can outshine entire galaxies, were instrumental to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that a mysterious "dark energy" is fueling the expansion of the universe. But astronomers haven't been able to pin down what causes these massive stellar explosions. Now, after studying a Type 1a supernova in a nearby galaxy, two researchers say that they must be the result of a collision between two white dwarf stars. They made their case this week in the journal Nature.

Using a powerful radio telescope, scientists have spotted an enormous cloud of dust billowing in the center of a supernova - finally. The discovery, announced at the American Astronomical Society, helps to confirm what scientists have long thought - that massive supernova explosions could have provided the dust found in the first galaxies. Early galaxies were dusty places, but where did that dust come from when the universe was still so new? Astronomers hypothesized that supernovae - the end-of-life explosions of stars at least eight times the size of our sun - may have been the source of that ancient, primordial dust.

Using a powerful radio telescope, scientists have spotted an enormous cloud of dust billowing in the center of a supernova - finally. The discovery, announced at the American Astronomical Society, helps to confirm what scientists have long thought - that massive supernova explosions could have provided the dust found in the first galaxies. Early galaxies were dusty places, but where did that dust come from when the universe was still so new? Astronomers hypothesized that supernovae - the end-of-life explosions of stars at least eight times the size of our sun - may have been the source of that ancient, primordial dust.

Astronomers have chronicled a record-setting burst of gamma rays from the violent death throes of a relatively nearby massive star that imploded into a black hole. The duration of the event -- on the order of hours -- as well as the number of photons created, the energy of those photons and the total explosive energy and radiance “topped the charts” for gamma ray bursts recorded by NASA and its international peers, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division. “This burst was a once-in-a-century cosmic event,” Hertz said during an international media briefing Thursday.

Light from the supernova 2013df has traveled more than 60 million light-years to finally be detectable from Earth, and today you have a chance to see it for yourself. At 4 p.m. PDT, sky watchers around the world can watch a live video feed of the supernova broadcast from a telescope in the Cayman Islands. The video comes courtesy of the online sky-watching site Slooh.com. A type II supernova occurs when a star more than 10 times more massive than our sun runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses in on itself.

Talk about a long trip: The explosion that created Supernova UDS10Wil, the oldest supernova discovered to date, took place more than 10 billion years ago, but light from the explosion only recently became visible to the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists estimate that this supernova is 350 million years older than the previous oldest known supernova, which was discovered just a few months ago. Scientists still don't know much about Supernova UDS10Wil, dubbed SN Wilson for short, but they are hoping its discovery can help them to answer questions about how supernovae were created in the early universe and to measure how fast the universe is expanding.

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope is providing fresh views of oddly bright black holes and breathtaking supernovae, scientists said Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach. NuSTAR mission scientists released high-energy X-ray images of two strangely bright black holes in the arms of spiral galaxy IC 342 about 7 million light years away and of Cassiopeia A, the shell of an exploded star, known as a supernova, just 11,000 light years away. Since its launch last summer , the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has been snapping shots at energies up to 79 kiloelectron volts - far beyond the roughly 10 KeV limit of other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Australian astronomers using a Hawaiian telescope have observed two so-called super-luminous supernovae, only the second and third such objects ever discovered. The new supernovae, 10 to 100 times brighter than conventional supernovas, are from the earliest stages of the universe and are thought to occur by a different mechanism, the researchers reported online Friday in the journal Nature. Conventional supernovae shine extremely brightly for several weeks or months, putting out more light than the entire galaxies they reside in. They typically have two causes: either the re-ignition of nuclear fusion in a degenerate star or the collapse of the core of a massive aging star.

A team led by Caltech astronomers has discovered a new type of supernova that may burn 100 times brighter than typical exploding stars — and they're trying to figure out exactly how this new type works. The study, which identified four newly discovered supernovae as part of this unknown class, also solves the mystery behind two previously unexplained events — one that had been thought to be an extremely luminous Type II supernova, and another whose nature had scientists completely baffled.

Astronomers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way galaxy, still just a baby at 140 years old. The scientists, who announced their findings Wednesday, used a radio observatory in New Mexico and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space to determine when the supernova occurred. They dated the event to around 1868. Before this, the youngest supernova in the Milky Way was thought to have occurred around 1680. A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star that releases an extraordinary amount of energy, enough to outshine an entire galaxy.

Astronomers have for the first time observed a nova-producing system turn into a supernova, a finding that indicates the universe has more than one way to create a nova. A normal Type Ia supernova is a rare event, occurring perhaps once or twice every century. The type of supernova observed by a team of astronomers led by astronomer Ben Dilday of UC Santa Barbara is estimated to occur about one time in every 1,000 supernovae. The findings are important because supernovae are generally all considered to have the same intrinsic brightness, making them what astronomers call "standard candles" used for estimating distances across the cosmos.

Type 1a supernovae, exploding stars that can outshine entire galaxies, were instrumental to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that a mysterious "dark energy" is fueling the expansion of the universe. But astronomers haven't been able to pin down what causes these massive stellar explosions. Now, after studying a Type 1a supernova in a nearby galaxy, two researchers say that they must be the result of a collision between two white dwarf stars. They made their case this week in the journal Nature.